Deeper Depth and Unlocking Potential
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Developer Blog, DPnP, E-RPG General DevelopmentWOW! What I didn’t consider before doing this is amazing! The really great part is that I am unlocking more depth to this system as I progress further into the developer’s tools. I can’t wait to unveil this thing, but first, the content creator at least, needs to get into the hands of some qualified testers. I have that group in mind and am getting closer to shipping it out to them. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today, it is about depth!
The depth of a universal system is staggering. The depth of E-RPG is unlimited, however, it is also a game with direction. There are universal systems that are relatively vague. E-RPG considered how things worked and made a structure for them. This has been a life saver through this.
When a system seems to have unlimited potential it runs the risk of being to hard to actually deal with. That is one of the reasons for DPnP. It shrinks down the creation of content. However, that is easy to do. I could have done the same with an bunch of excel sheets or something. The truth is that an application designed to make the scope of E-RPG more accessible can do so much more. One of those things is automation.
So this week, as I wrap up the final wizards, it has been about the wizards “talking” to eachother. This means that it simplifies some redundant tasks. For instance, if you notice that in the Fantasy Sagas Player’s Guidebook the skill groups for melee weapons match the equipment groups. So, to make things easier, when you create a melee weapons group in the content creator it builds an equipment group for you. Also, notice how most melee skills (and other ranged skills for that matter) seem to have proficiencies like “per weapon”. Well, that is done for you too. Create a weapon in the item wizard and it automatically adds the weapon to the skill’s proficiency list.
Of course, this is not set in stone. You are not required to have a proficiency list made for you and then keep it. You can still manage the list, add and remove proficiencies. All this really does is take the process down a notch and makes sure you don’t have to do a bunch of back and forth, and redundant, creation.
These are the types of things I am striving for with DPnP. It is not simply an application. Doing that is not doing anything special. There are virtual table top and campaign creation stuff out there. However, while they are focused on simply making you able to do certain things, I am focusing on doing these things in a way that the user will not find it a tedious event.
Imagine the possibilities of creating a detailed campaign in an easy way! This is the type of thing that will truly break down barriers in gaming. What you can do with this would require months of creation for a single team. You can do it in half the time as a single person.
This is it folks. The last portion of the Content Creator. Once these things are talking to each other a test will proceed. I will take the entire Fantasy Sagas Player’s guidebook and create the content in DPnP for the character creator, It is a book that took me years to write. Now, let see what it takes to create the book again in DPnP. Once I finish the creator, I will post a message announcing the start of the data input. I will then keep a log in the DPnP forums on time spent on data entry. We can see how long it takes to make it all come together.
Until then….
Happy Gaming!
